


Exile

by placentalmammal



Series: Valerie [3]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-14
Updated: 2015-07-14
Packaged: 2018-04-09 06:34:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4337633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/placentalmammal/pseuds/placentalmammal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arcade and Cass muse on past relationships, 10 years after Fallout New Vegas.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Exile

Ten years since the NCR had annexed New Vegas and the outlying territories, and Arcade still didn’t know exactly how he felt about Valerie Cruz. She’d been the lynchpin in the NCR’s easy conquest of the Mojave, and the Freesiders didn’t call her “that bitch” for nothing. In the months leading up to the Second Battle of Hoover Dam, she’d burned more bridges than Arcade had known she’d had. Five months, she’d gone from a lackadaisical drunk to the kind of woman who’d “bite your dick off as soon as look at you” (Cass’ words, not his own).

He never did find out exactly what it was that had flipped the switch and convinced Valerie to sober up and win the war. For a while, he’d thought that it might have been him, but Cass had worked very hard to put that notion out of his head during the weeklong party following the NCR’s victory at the Dam. “Christ Ganon,” she’d said, “War changes people. You ain’t the goddamn center of the universe.”

A few drinks later, she told him that Valerie had told her what was up. “But I’m not telling you,” she said, seriously. “She wants you to know, she’ll tell you herself.”

Evidently, she didn’t, because after the celebration ended, he never heard from Valerie again. He returned to Freeside a few days after the party, and found it positively swarming with NCR troopers-the Kings had resisted, and the NCR had put them down, like dogs. He made his way through the carnage and back to Old Mormon Fort. The battle had torn up Freeside’s residential neighborhoods, and the Fort was overrun with refugees. Arcade’s life became a blur of requisition forms and applications for temporary housing, and it all came to a screeching halt when the Followers were evicted from Old Mormon Fort two months later.

The Rangers needed a new headquarters after relocating from Camp Golf, and decided that Old Mormon Fort, with its reinforced walls and centralized location, was ideal for their headquarters. NCR officials “requested” that the Followers cede the Fort to them, and then “encouraged” them to leave Outer Vegas entirely. When the Rangers raised the Californian flag over Old Mormon Fort, Arcade recalled Orion Moreno’s bitter farewell to Navarro: “Kiss America goodbye, boys.”

Tears in her eyes, Julie disbanded the Mojave charter of the Followers of the Apocalypse later that day. They had no base, and nowhere to go. The best thing to do, Julie said, was for everyone to go home to their families. They had tried, they had failed.

Arcade moved back west and found teaching work with the Followers in the Hub, and tried to take some satisfaction in shaping the doctors of the future. He wasn’t particularly suited to teaching, but his experience was unmatched, and at least some of his pupils appreciated his dry wit. For a while, he exchanged letters with Veronica, but in 2284, she mentioned “heading east to look for an old friend,” and her letters stopped coming after that. She left no forwarding address, so Arcade was left to hope she’d found what she was looking for.

Boone proved to be a surprisingly faithful letter-writer. He sent long, fat letters about his exploits since Hoover Dam (he spent a few years with First Recon, then moved north to Utah to marry a tribal woman he met on deployment). His grammar left something to be desired, but Arcade came to enjoy his letters as a means through which to vicariously live out all his sordid domestic fantasies. He even enjoyed the pictures of Boone’s kids, all of whom inherited their father’s unfortunately shaped head.

They talked about meeting up in New Vegas, once the kids were older, to share a few beers and reminisce about the good old days. It never happened, and for that, Arcade was eternally grateful. It would be embarrassing to show up, fundamentally unchanged, and soil their lovely family dynamic with his particular brand of irritable disenfranchisement. He’d probably corrupt their children and set them down a path of choleric, spinsterly academia, and no one wanted that.

To Arcade’s eternal chagrin, the person he saw most frequently was one Rose of Sharon Cassidy. She rebuild her old caravan and used Valerie’s connections to land a government contract. She spent her days on the road, cackling (Arcade imagined) and accumulating ridiculous amounts of wealth. She managed to spin ash into gold, and she always made a point of stopping in to visit Arcade when she was in the Hub, just to rub her ill-gotten gains in his face. Arcade tried and failed to convince her to give it all to him, and she ended up spending it all on expensive presents for Boone’s kids.

She made the long treks north to visit them, and reported that Boone was “fat, happy, and stupid in-love,” his wife was “too pretty for him by far,” and “the brats” were “a good sight uglier than their daddy,” and then she said they’d all converted to Mormonism and tried to make her join up. 

“I was half-convinced until they said I’d have to give up drinking, and then I was out of there so fast the room spun.”

“The room’s always spinning with you, Cass.”

Her travels also brought her into contact with Raul, who’d settled down in outer Vegas and was “smug as ever.” He’d started up a little repair shop, and was making a decent living “building toasters and howitzers and I don’t know what-all. Kids love him,” she said. “Call him ‘abuelo feo,’ or some shit. He calls ‘em all ‘gordito’ and gives ‘em candy. Symbiosis.”

Lily moved west in search of her grandbabies, but even Cass didn’t know what’d become of her. Like Veronica, there was nothing left of her but the hope that she’d find what she was looking for.

Valerie was the only person Cass had nothing to say about. Ten years, and she’d more or less vanished, living as a recluse in the Lucky 38 with her robots. Rex, ED-E, the remnants of the Securitron army: seemed like Valerie’d had better luck with machines than humans. But after a few crude jokes about FISTO, Cass fell silent, staring into the bottom of her glass.

“She ever tell you why she went crazy?”

Arcade shook his head. “I never saw her after the Dam.”

“She had a kid.”

“What?”

“Long time ago. She lived out east somewheres, had a husband and a kid. She was young-shit, 23? 25, maybe? And got sick of it all and ran away to Vegas.”

“She went out to find her family?”

Cass turned her glass over in her hands, running a finger over a chip in the rim. “That ain’t the half of it. A few years after she left, the Legion swept through that part of Colorado, and-”

Arcade did the math as Cass spoke. “-And her son would have been the right age to become a Legionary-”

Cass nodded.

“Shit.”

“More or less. She went east six or seven years ago. I told her it was a fools’ errand, but you know how she gets.”

He sat back in his chair. “And here I thought it was because I wouldn’t sleep with her.”

“Like I said: ‘you ain’t the goddamn center of the universe.’”

They lapsed into silence. Arcade refilled his glass from the bottle (of good whiskey, he saved it special for Cass), and glanced around his little apartment. He’d hung some of the pictures of Boone’s kids on the walls, just to alleviate the bareness. He had an afghan from Lily on the back of the sofa, a vase of flowers on the kitchen table. The followers had given him the apartment and the most basic of furnishings, but all the rest was his, from the food in the cupboards to the curtains on the window. He’d built himself a life, free from the ghosts of his past.

He raised his glass. “To Valerie,” he said, finally.

“To Valerie,” Cass echoed.

“May she find what she’s looking for.”

“Amen,” and then they drained their glasses and set them on the table. In distant Colorado, the howling wind swept down the mountainsides, and the valley grass stirred in reply.


End file.
